Annette Messager

Annette Messager, La Derniere Seance (The Final Screening), 2008. Photograph by Adatabase

Annette Messager, La Derniere Seance (The Final Screening), 2008. Photograph by Adatabase

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Cinema is the home of illusion and make believe, a place where we go willingly to immerse ourselves in imaginary worlds and experience extremes of emotion at a safe remove from reality. As such, it provided fertile territory for Annette Messager (b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer), whose highly theatrical installations occupied a space somewhere between the fairytale and the grotesque, provoking at once amusement and horror, pleasure and fear. In her work for MADE UP, especially conceived for the former ABC Cinema, Messager invited us to attend La Dernière Séance (The Final Screening).

This ghostly installation conjured the phantom of the former cinema. A sea of undulating black silk lit from beneath revealed occasional glimpses of bulging shapes squashed between the cinema seating, while behind the cinema screen we saw the shadowy silhouette of a dangling skeleton. Messager transported us to a world before cinema, where ‘smoke and mirrors’ were used to generate phantasmagoric visions. The slow action of inflation and deflation that animated the piece mimicked the spectrum of feeling which Messager’s creation aroused in its viewers.

Messager delights in multiplicity and plurality, incorporating numerous games for the viewer in her works, material and verbal/ Net, a reacuring material in her work since the late 1980's. is chosen by Messager not only as a play on her own name (An-nette), but also because of its inherent contradictions as a material - full of holes, yet often used to contain or constrain. The title for La Dernière Séance (The Final Screening),  is similarly chosen for the multiple meanings it evokes in the artist's native french. Séance translates as 'session' or 'performance', and is used as well as a session dedicated to communicating with the spirit worlds 9as the word has come to mean in English) In Messager's pluralistic vocabulary all three are interwoven in an elaborate play where a surreal imagery gives voice to the phantasma that lurk within us all.

Annette Messager at Liverpool Biennial 2008

La Dernière Séance (The Final Screening), 2008
Installation
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2008
Exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial Visitor Centre (former ABC cinema, Lime Street)